Educational psychologist Robert M. Gagné’s general guidelines can be extremely useful when designing effective learning systems.
For the planning stage, he emphasized the importance of identifying knowledge or skills that could be a prerequisite of each type of learning outcome, analyzing the internal and external conditions necessary to achieve desired outcomes, identifying the context and learners’ characteristics, selecting the right media, and planning the best ways to motivate and eventually evaluate the learners.
During the course of the instruction, the trainer or training tool should first grab the learner’s attention, introduce the learning objectives, stimulate the recall of previously learned material, present the instructional content, elicit performance, provide formative and summative evaluation in the form of feedback and performance assessment, and finally enhance retention and transfer of learned information to other contexts.
Overview of Gagné‘s steps of instruction:
- Catching attention
- Informing the learner of the objectives
- Stimulating recall of prior knowledge
- Presenting information
- Providing guidance
- Eliciting performance
- Providing feedback
- Assessing performance
- Enhacing retention and transfer